It may
happen that politics has caused damage, which omens even worse damage,
such that Mercy has to come to a compromise with evil so as
to get man out of his mire (Rev of Ares XLIII/12).
The reason, among other reasons, why the Father asks us not to
appeal to his Mercy at every turn (16/15) is that the kind of
mercy that men hope for rarely turns out to be that which the Father
picks. So, today, Mercy
might well come to the Middle East thanks to a man, James Baker, all
the more unexpected because he was not especially beneficial or
providential when he was a member of Reagan and George Bush Sr's
administration. "Jim" Baker may be the wise man that George W. Bush Jr
will pay attention to in order to resolve the catastrophic impediment
in Iraq.
The total number of civilian casualties of the war in Iraq
from 2003 to 2006 has just been worked out: 600,000—actually a death
toll range of 400,000 to 760,000—by humanitarian and medical
organisations seemingly of great integrity. So enormous that it's
incredible! George W. Bush has declared that 600,000 was an "untruthful
and outrageous" number; he has asserted that the number of civilian
casualties in Iraq had been 30,000, if that! Who is right? Who is
wrong?
We don't know. We are just aware that Iraq has been put to fire
and the
sword so much so that some "authorized voices" have made themselves
heard muttering that Saddam Hussein should be called back , because he
alone may be able to re-establish order and save a million to a million
five hundred thousand Iraqi lives very likely to die.
What's more, the toll in American and British military life (not to
mention undisclosed losses) is getting alarmingly heavier day after
day, so that General Richard Dannat, chief of staff of the
British Army, declared on October 13 that the British troops
should
withdraw as soon as possible, because they had come to do nothing but
stir up the hatred of the Iraqi people.
Now and then President Bush still happens to deliver triumphalist
speeches probably sincere. On October 22: "We will win a victory in
Iraq. We only have to change strategy." A victory over what? Over
terrorism? But Iraq has never gone into terrorist action and never
granted Al Quaeda and Bin Laden asylum.
We can see enough obscurity and misfortune in the situation to hope
that the influence that reasonable Americans have started to bring or
try to bring to bear on on George W. Bush will grow more and more
imperious.
Jim Baker, the one whose advice the White House may well end up
following, fits in the realistic body as far as foreign policy is
concerned. He represents all that George W. Bush feels strong aversion
for and wants to fight throughout the world, and that you can sum up in
two words, "constructive ambiguity." This doctrine by James Baker
means
something the Father in person knows, that is, times now and then
happen when man has to negotiate with evil in order to dispel some ten
times worse evil, tragic times when the huge weakness that
nastiness constitutes with some kinds of humans should not be
disregarded (Rev of Ares 36/5). A long way we have to go
until the day when our mission has changed
the heart of men enough to save them from coming to compromises with
evil, but we at the same time realize that our mission is momentous.

27Oct06 47usC1
It is rather quaint to be looking to a Republican for wisdom and
peacefulness, is it not?
Ever since the Revolutionary War was ended, there has been a school in
the United States opposing the [democratic] principles of the
Constitution and advocating capital-F Federalism – as opposed to
federalism, the fraternity of equals. Conspicuously, Alexander
Hamilton, even more so, Abraham Lincoln.
And Baker is the archetypical Republican – I shall be very surprised,
indeed, if he holds that the government in Baghdad is to be confined to
defending Iraq fron the Iranians in the East and the Turks in the North
and the Kuwaitis in he South.
There was, at least once, a Republican candidate who opposed this
school, Barry Goldwater; he won 27 million votes in 1964.
Brian F, New York